Facebook Includes User Search in Activity Log

Facebook has rolled out a new feature Friday that will show all the searches you make on the social networking site.

This new feature will appear in the users' Activity Log pages and will allow users to review all the queries made on Facebook. Only the searches made hereafter will be available in the Activity Log. You cannot go back to see who you have been stalking repeatedly.

This works in the same way as your searches and URL history in your web browser.

Facebook has set the default privacy setting for the searches to "Only Me" and this cannot be changed unlike privacy settings of other Activity Log entries. The company told TechCrunch that even if a user deletes his searches, Facebook will still use the data from it for user's News Feed customization.

At the TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco last week, CEO Mark Zukerberg said that Facebook got more than a billion search queries per day.

"Search is interesting. We do on the order of 1 billion queries a day and we're basically not even trying," he said. "Today with search the vast majority of it is people trying to find people, but there's also a meaningful portion of queries where people are trying to find Pages, brand Pages, other business Pages - so there's a bunch of that that actually does link to commercial behavior, and I think there's a big opportunity there and we just need to go do that."

He also hinted on the underlying ambition of his company when he said, "These are questions that you could potentially do at Facebook if we built out this system that you couldn't do anywhere else. And at some point we'll do it. We have a team working on search."

The new feature is not expected to be widely available for a few weeks.